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“I’m opening the stand,” he said. Mama wanted to yell at him, shake him, punch him. Instead she cried in the woods along the paths.

“Heidiii!” Mama called. “Oh Heidiii!”

It seemed to her that the whole of the forest was permeated with Heidi’s spirit. She felt something move in the bushes and spun around, expecting to see Heidi come running out. When Anner tried to console Mama, Mama ended up consoling her, still thinking in her shock that somehow everything was going to be all right.

“Heidi was just there behind that bush, scurrying away,” she told Anner. “I feel her everywhere. In the leaves and the grass and the breeze. She’s all around us.”

Sandy felt Heidi’s spirit, too. When she rose in the darkness to fetch water at the well for baking bread, Heidi’s energy seemed to pulse in the darkness. As she dipped the bucket into the water with the well pulley, the spirit shape ballooned bigger and bigger around her until she couldn’t breathe. Fearing the intensity of those morning excursions, she began to wake Larry and make him come with her.

I sat in the woodshed loft in the golden light of afternoons repeating Heidi’s names to myself in a litany, a song to call her back to me.

“Hieds, Ho, Hi, Heidi-didi, Heidi-Ho, Hodie.”

I sang and sang, but she never came to the foot of that ladder again.

Around the campfire in the evenings, Anner sat in silence now, hesitant to raise her voice or guitar in song.

“Remember that crow? It was wise somehow,” someone said into the darkness.

“It was an omen,” another agreed, the myth of ravens and crows as messengers, harbingers of death, coming to mind. The crow had showed up that spring before Heidi died, the hush of its black wings cutting the sky. It landed on the patio and cawed down at the gardens, guttural and insistent. “Caw-akkkk.”

“Nevermore,” an apprentice said in an ominous voice, evoking Edgar Allan Poe’s famous raven. We’d gathered around in a circle where the bird had hopped to the grassy space beneath the ash tree. It was larger than most crows; perhaps it was in fact a raven. It nodded its head, strutted on ringed feet, and made a gurgling noise in its throat, its obsidian head jutting forward and back from its body and ocher beak like a dark cave when it cawed. It was different from the many other crows that ate from the compost heaps and struck dark silhouettes in the trees around the house. There was a wise knowing in the dark marbles of its eyes.

Larry had noticed a feather hanging out of alignment from the ebony curve of one wing and wondered if it had been hurt and was slightly lame. He leaned forward and tried to pull the stray feather free, but the crow hopped just out of his reach as he scrambled after.

“Stop,” Anner had said. “Don’t mess with it.” It flapped onto the patio, then dropped off the rock edge, catching air under its wings, and flew up onto a branch of the ash tree.

“You know why they call it a murder of crows?” someone asked. “Because a group of them will gang up on a solitary crow and kill it. Maybe they tried to do that to this one.”

Heidi took a particular liking to that crow, following it around and talking to it in her own bird voice. It would gurgle-purr back at her. Perhaps she could understand it the way she understood the trees and Telonferdie. It came by every day for a month or so, dropping in at lunch to eat scraps and establishing itself as a member of our eclectic community. Jean also reported seeing it next door at her house. Someone finally looked up the old rhyme and recited it at lunch:

One crow for sorrow, two for mirth,

Three for a wedding, four for a birth,

Five for silver, six for gold,

Seven for a secret not to be told.

Eight for heaven, nine for hell,

And ten for the devil’s own self.

Heidi was especially upset when we didn’t see our feathered friend for a number of days and realized the crow was not coming back. To ease her distress, we blamed its departure on the fact that